Band:	Kólga
Album:	Black Tides
Style:	Black metal, Blackened surf rock
Release date:	March 29, 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. Space Beach Massacre
02. Squall Of Cthulhu
03. Tethys
04. Riptide
05. Endless Bummer
06. Is This Real?
07. The Kraken

Remember those "original Trve Kvlt surf music" vids on YouTube of surf music versions of black metal? What if a band did that for an entire record, but with original music?

If there's one thing that those surf rock black metal covers showed us is how surprisingly similar the guitar playing of the two genres are, and how that tremolo-picking just needs its distortion added or removed to switch between the two genres. That's about where the similarities end, but with how fundamentally significant the guitar playing is in both of these genres, that was enough to build this whole gimmick of combining the two. As funny as the thought of a person in corpse paint surfing is, at some point the similarities between the two end. Surf rock just ain't got that frost, man. You can't surf your way through Blashyrkh.

Sure, black metal is often seen as cold and frosty and there have been exceptions to that rule, from Wayfarer to Vallendusk to Fluisteraars. But there is something as a line that, once crossed, it just feels wrong. That wrongness is kind of the point with something as clearly comical as the entire concept that Kólga go for, and that kind of wrongness is also something that does feel somewhat exciting to chase. Those original videos were well made but the silliness relied mostly on how absurd the concept was, and once that has been prototyped, having effort put into building surf black metal from zero rather than adapting already made black metal is indeed more exciting.

You can tell Black Tides is a debut, even with the experience of the band members, with ties to bands like Dead To A Dying World and Cleric (USA-TX). There's a feeling that there is a lot of room for improvement and that the band is still figuring out how to actually make something as wildly out there as this. But Black Tides works much better than the sheer concept of its existence would give it the right to. The atmospheric black metal expertise is obvious, the psychedelic rock organs are an amazing touch, and even though I listened to infinitely (not really) more black metal than surf rock, the moments that are so over the top in their... uhh... surfness... just put a smile on my face.

Black Tides falls in that weird spot where it is much better than just the conceptual gimmick it's going for but it also feels like there's room to develop and this was just a test drive for that sound. Time will tell whether that room to develop is filled or whether Black Tides is as far as surf black metal goes.